This month I was able to dive into some elite-level business and management books. I learned a few things about the process of self-learning, as well. Like, type up all of your notes when you’re done reading the book. Otherwise, you will spend hours at the end of the month, typing everything up when you had that time reserved for writing a blog on your progress.  

You can read additional entries in my leap year-long journey here:

https://medium.com/@mikehyzy or https://michaelhyzy.com/

The following are my notes for the following books:

How to Win Friends and Influence People – First three principles

Zero to One – Peter Thiel

The Lean Startup – Eric Reis

The Infinite Game – Simon Sinek

Making of a Manager – Julie Zhou

Art of War – Sun Tzu

48 Laws of Power – First four laws 

It’s a long read. I do suggest you read all the books in their entirety, but you can also skim the topics and find what works best for you.  

Why these books? Because they cover:

Strategy when you’re in the ideation phase

The nuts and bolts of putting your business or product together successfully 

How to manage your staff

How to deal with other humans 

Longevity Mindset

What your competition is thinking

Dale Carnegie – How to Win Freinds and Influence People – Part 1

A classic, and one of my favorites, I’ve probably read 200 times. And I should read it for 300 more. The principles of this book should be ever imprinted in your brain. 

What do you need to start? “Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with people.”

As you read a chapter per week, ask yourself, “How can I apply this principle this week?”

It’s not about reading this book; it’s about forming new habits. That’s why we circle through this a few times in the year. 

Make sure your team holds you accountable if you violate a principle. You will have to buy donuts, lunch, etc.  

In giving an example of a highly successful Wall Street banker at the time, “he owed most of his success to the constant application of his homemade system.” By doing a weekly self-examination, he was able to decrease actions that were causing pain points. 

• What mistakes did I make this week?
• What did I do that was right? 
• What way could I have improved my performance?
• What lessons can I learn from that experience?

Make it a point to record your triumphs in the application of these principles.

Principle #1: Don’t critize, condemn, or complain.

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creates bristling with prejudices and motivated by prince and vanity.”

“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism, and it breeds sympathy, tolerance, and kindness.”

Principle #2: Give honest and sincere appreciation.

Legendary businessman Charles Schwab, “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person an incentive to work. So I am anxious to prose but loath to find fault.” 

“Try leaving a friendly trail of tile sparks of gratitude on your daily trips. You will be surprised how they will set small flames of friendship that will be rose beacons on your next visit.”

Principle #3: Arouse in the other person an eager want

“Tomorrow, you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: How can I make this person want to do it?”

“He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”

“Here is one of the best bits of advice ever given about the fine art of human relationships. If there is any one secret of success, said Henry Ford, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

——-

Eric Ries – The Lean Startup

There is so much information in this book. It gives all the steps you need to a successful product development phase and then the steps afterward to scale. 

The Lean Startup Method:

1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere
2. Entrepreneurship is management 
3. Validated Learning
4. Build – Measure – Learn
5. Innovation accounting 

The two most essential assumptions entrepreneurs make are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis:

The value hypothesis tests whether a product or service delivers value to customers once they are using it

The growth hypothesis tests how new customers will discover a product or service. 

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters who feel the need for the product most acutely and are more willing to give feedback and forgive mistakes. These are the ones who will test the MVP. 

Design and the Customer Archetype:

The goal of such early contact with customers is not to gain definitive answers. Instead, it is to clarify at a fundamental, course level that we understand our potential customer and what problems they have, With that understanding, we can craft a customer archetype, a brief document that seeks to humanize the proposed target customer. 

Lean UX:

Designers realize that customer archetype is a hypothesis, not a fact. The customer profile should be considered provisional until the strategy.

Early adopters use their imagination to fill in what a product is missing. They prefer that state of affairs because what they care about above all is being the first to use or adopt a new product or technology. In enterprise products, it’s often about gaining a competitive advantage by taking a risk with something new that competitors don’t have yet.

MVP – when in doubt, simplify. If customers don’t sign up for the free trial, they’ll never get to experience the fantastic features that await them. Even if they do sign up, there are many other opportunities for waste. For example, how many features do we need to include to appeal to early adopters? Every extra feature is a form of waste. 

Innovation Accounting:

The rate of growth depends primarily on three things: the profitability of each customer, the cost of acquiring new customers, and the repeat purchase rate of existing customers. The higher these values are, the faster the company will grow. 

Innovation accounting works in three steps: 

• First, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now
• Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine form the baseline toward the ideal, micro changes and optimizations
• Third, either pivot or preserve

If the company is making good progress towards the ideal, then it makes sense to continue. If not, something is flawed and needs a severe change. 

Establish the Baseline:

Before building the prototype, do a smoke test. It’s an old direct marketing technique that allows customers to preorder a product before its built. It only measures one thing, if customers are interested in trying a product. By itself, this is insufficient to validate an entire growth model. It can be used to get feedback on this assumption before committing more money and resources to a product.

The MVP provides the fist example of a learning milestone. You can track conversion rates, sign-up, and trial rates, customer lifetime value, and so on. It makes sense to test the riskiest assumptions first. 

Tuning the Engine:

The second learning milestone. A company might spend time improving the design of its product to make it easier for new customers to use. Design iteration presupposes that the activation rate of new customers is a driver of growth and that its baseline is lower than the command would like. To demonstrate validated learning, the design changes must improve the activation rate of new customers. If they do not, the new design should be judged as a failure. This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better. 

Pivot or Preserve:

If we’re not moving the drivers of our business model were mot making progress. That becomes a sure sign that it’s time to pivot.  

The sign of a successful pivot is that the new experiments you are running overall are more productive than the tests you were running before. This is the pattern: poor quantitative results force us to declare failure and create the motivation, context, and space for more qualitative research. These investigations produce new ideas- new hypotheses – to be tested, leading to a possible pivot. Each pivot unlocks new opportunities for further experimentation, and the cycle repeats. Every time we repeat this simple rhythm: establish the baseline, tune the engine, and make a decision to pivot or preserve.  

Improving a Product on Five Dollars a Day:

Track the “funnel metrics” that were critical to the engine of growth: customer registration, downloads, trail repeat usage, and purchase. But clicks on the AdWords system (Google), Five dollars bought them one hundred clicks – every day. From a marketing point of view, this was not very significant, but for learning, it was priceless. Every single day we were able to measure our product’s performance with a brand new set of customers. 

Optimization Versus Learning:

If you are building the wrong thing, optimizing the product or its marketing will not yield significant results. The innovation accounting framework makes it clear when the company is stuck and needs to change direction. As they say in systems theory, that which optimizes one part of the system necessarily undermines the system as a whole. 

Split Tests:

A split-test experiment is one in which different versions of a product are offered to customers a the same time. Split testing often uncovers surprising things. For example, many features that make the product better in the eyes of engineers and designers have no impact on customer behavior. 

During split tests in one example, it was proved that gamification was extremely useful. 

Agile:

User stories were not considered complete until they led to validated learning. This validation would come in the form of a split test showing a change in customer behavior but also might include customer interviews or surveys.  If the validation fails and it turns out the story is a bad idea, the relevant feature is removed from the product.

Engineering may finish a big batch of work, followed by extensive testing and validation. As engineers look for ways to increase their productivity, they start to realize that if they include the validation exercise from the beginning, the whole team can be more productive. Most important, organizations working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not items of the production of new features. 

The three A’s of metrics: Actionable, accessible and auditable 

For a report to be considered actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect.

For reports to be considered accessible, they are out and ready to read, with each experiment and its results explained in plain English. 

For results to be auditable, the data is credible to employees. They can test the data by hand, in the messy real world, by talking to customers. It also has a second benefit: systems that provide this level of audibility give managers and entrepreneurs the opportunity to gain insights into why customers are heaving the way the data indicate. 

95% of the work in a new startup is gritty that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritization decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to subject a grand vision to constant testing and feedback. 

Catalog of Pivots:

• Zoom – In Pivot
• Zoom – Out Pivot
• Customer Segment Pivot
• Customer Need Pivot
• Platform Pivot
• Business Architecture Pivot
• Value Capture Pivot
• Engine of Growth Pivot
• Channel Pivot
• Technology Pivot

Batch:

The process works in the inverse order: Figure out what is needed to learn and then work backward to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. It’s the hypothesis about the customer that pulls work from product development and other functions; any additional development is waste. 

Lean production techniques are powerful, and they only are a manifestation of high-functioning organizations that are committed to achieving maximum performance. 

The Five Whys:

The core idea of the Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms. At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem. Five Whys provides an opportunity to discover why the human problem might be. When confronted with a problem, have you ever stopped and asked why five times? It is difficult to do even though it sounds natural. By using and answering “why” five times, we can get to the real cause of the problem, which is often hidden in more apparent symptoms. 

The first step of implementation is to make sure that everyone affected by the problem is in the room during the analysis of the root cause. The meeting should include anyone who discovered or diagnosed the problem. 

Simple rules are:

• Be tolerant of all mistakes the first time
• Never allow the same mistake to made twice

Appoint a Five Whys Master – This individual is tasked with being the moderator for each Five Whys meeting, making decisions about which prevention steps to take, and assigning the follow-up work from that meeting. The Five Whys master is the point person in terms of accountability; he or she is the primary CHANGE AGENT. 

Innovative Sandbox:

1. Any team can create an actual split-test experiment that affects only the sandboxed parts of the product or service (for a multipart product) or only specific customer segments or territories (for a new product). However: 
2. One team must see the whole experiment through from end to end
3. No experiment can run longer than a specified about of time
4. No experiment can affect more than a specified number of customers
5. Every experiment has to be evaluated on the basis of a single standard report of five to ten actionable metrics
6. Every team that works inside the sandbox and every product built must use the same metrics to evaluate
7. Any team that creates an experiment must monitor the metrics and customer reactions while the experiment is in progress and abort if something catastrophic happens

——————————————

Peter Thiel – Zero to One

Lessons from the dot-com crash:

1. Make incremental advances
2. Stay lean and flexible
3. Improve on the competition
4. Focus on product, not sales

But these lessons are more correct today:

1.  It is better to risk boldness than triviality
2. A bad plan is better than no plan
3. Competitive markets destroy profits
4. Sales matters just as much as the product

What valuable company is nobody building? If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business. Mindset = Monopoly

Creative monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival. 

Monopolists disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of serval smaller markets. 

Characteristics of a monopoly:

1. Proprietary technology
2. Network Effects
3. Economies of Scale
4. Branding

Power Law:

1. One market will probably be better than all others
2. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others, too
3. Time and decision-making follow a power-law – some moments matter far more than others
4. What’s most important is rarely obvious 

How to Sell A Product:

Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. The total net profit that you earn on average throughout your relationship with a customer is the “Customer Lifetime Value” but exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer, “Customer Acquisition Cost.” In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you’re going to have to spend for people to buy it. 

Seven Questions Every Business Must Answer:

1. The Engineering Question
   1. Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
2. The Timing Question
   1. Is now the right time to start your particular business?
3. The Monopoly Question
   1. Are you starting with a significant share of a small market?
4. The People Question
   1. Do you have the right team?
5. The Distribution Question
   1. Do you have a way not just to create but deliver your product?
6. The Durability Question
   1. Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years in the future?
7. The Secret Question
   1. Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

Audiobooks I’ve read at the gym as I’ve been working out so I couldn’t take notes:

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek – Five lessons and takeaways

Revised Notes from 15 Minute Business Books

I wrote this book to rally those who are ready to challenge that status quo and replace it with a reality that is vastly more conducive to our deep-seated human need to feel safe, to contribute to something bigger than ourselves, and to provide for ourselves and our families.

it is our collective responsibility to find, guide, and support those who are committed to leading in a way that will more likely bring that vision to life.

—–

Simply put: The responsibility of business is to use its will and resources to advance a cause greater than itself, protect the people and places in which it operates, and generate more resources so that it can continue doing all those things for as long as possible.

Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game

——————–

In the book, he makes one key point, fleshed out with many stories, examples, and implications. His position: business is not a game with a final clock; it is an infinite game. And the most significant consequence is that business people need to play a very long game, and pretty much ignore the “next quarter is all that matters” game plan that way too many leaders follow.

And, this really has to be understood at the beginning of this conversation: Milton Friedman and his essay from 1970, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, The New York Times Magazine — (as opposed to the view of Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations). Friedman insisted that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” — In other words, according to Friedman, the sole purpose of business is to make money, and that money belongs to the shareholders.

He gives credit to Professor James P. Carse, who penned a little treatise called Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility in 1986. According to Carse, a finite-minded leader plays to end the game—to win. And if they want to be the winner, then there has to be a loser. — Carse’s infinite player plays to keep playing. In business, that means building an organization that can survive its leaders.

Here are the critical differences between Finite Games vs. The Infinite Game.

• Finite games are played by known players. They have fixed rules. And there is an agreed-upon objective that, when reached, ends the game.
• Infinite games, in contrast, are played by known and unknown players. There are no exact or agreed-upon rules. Though there may be conventions or laws that govern how the players conduct themselves, within those broad boundaries, the players can operate however they want. And if they choose to break with convention, they can. The manner in which each player chooses to play is entirely up to them. And they can change how they play the game at any time, for any reason.
• There is no such thing as winning education; no one is ever crowned the winner of careers; there is no such thing as winning global politics. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things are journeys, not events.

In my synopses, I ask: What is the point (of this book)? My answer to this book is: Business is not working very well; for many companies, and many people. The problem is that we are viewing and approaching business as a Finite Game. The solution is a genuine mindset change, a redefinition of business as an Infinite Game.

And I ask, Why is this book worth our time? Here are my three answers.

#1 – We are too focused on the next quarter. This book will compel us to take a longer view.

#2 — We are too focused on profits only. This book will take a more comprehensive view – which will, ironically, lead to higher profits in the long run.

#3 – We are too focused on winning by beating our competition. This book will re-focus our attention to a “worthy rival,” in the midst of an “everyone can win” environment.

Here are a few key highlights from the book (the best of Randy’s highlighted passages):

• Decades after the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense during the war, had the chance to meet Nguyen Co Thach, the North Vietnamese Foreign Ministry’s chief specialist in the United States from 1960 to 1975. McNamara was flabbergasted by how badly America misunderstood their enemy. “You must never have read a history book,” McNamara recounts Thach scolding him. “If you had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians… Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years?” 

• Sadly, over the course of the past thirty to forty years, finite-minded leadership has become the modern standard in business.

• According to a study by McKinsey, the average life span of an S& P 500 company has dropped over forty years since the 1950s, from an average of sixty-one years to less than eighteen years today.

• We call it “vision” because it must be something we can “see.”

• We need something with a permanence for us to rally around. 

• I am often surprised how many visionary leaders don’t think they need to find the words for or write down their Cause. They assume that because their vision is clear to them, it’s clear to everyone else in the organization. Which of course it’s not. A Just Cause that is preserved on paper can be handed down from generation to generation; a founder’s instinct cannot. 

• I often meet senior executives who seem to suffer from a kind of “finite exhaustion.”

It’s a strange quirk of human nature. The order in which a person presents information more often than not reveals their actual priorities and the focus of their strategies. 

• With each ethical transgression that is tolerated, we pave the road for more and more significant moral transgressions.

• Put a good person in an environment that suffers ethical fading, and that person becomes susceptible to ethical lapses themselves. Likewise, take a person, even one who may have acted unethically in the past, put them in a stronger, more values-based culture, and that same person will also act in accordance with the standards and norms of that environment.

He argues that you, and all business leaders, will default to the finite game. Over and over again. Maintaining an infinite mindset is hard. Very hard.

Here are five essential practices for the infinite game:

• Advance a Just Cause — A Just Cause is a specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision. …A Just Cause is not the same as our WHY. A WHY comes from the past. It is an origin story. It is a statement of who we are. …A Just Cause is about the future. It defines where we are going. It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to helping build.
• Build Trusting Teams
• Study your Worthy Rivals
• Prepare for Existential Flexibility
• Demonstrate the Courage to Lead

And this just great cause must be:

• For something — affirmative and optimistic
• Inclusive — Open to all those who would like to contribute
• Service-oriented — for the primary benefit of others
• Resilient — able to endure political, technological and cultural change
• Idealistic — Big, bold and ultimately unachievable
• He strongly warns against Ethical Fading: Ethical fading is a condition in a culture that allows people to act in unethical ways in order to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others, while falsely believing that they have not compromised their own moral principles. In fact, if we look closely, we begin to see signs of ethical fading in lots of businesses.

And here are my five lessons and takeaways:

#1 – The short game will likely end up with only short gains. Aim for the Infinite Game.

#2 – The goal is not short-term profits, but long-term…endurance, loyalty, community.

#3 – Be very clear about developing a true Just Cause. And stick to seeking to fulfill that cause!

#4 – The Infinite Game might save you from ethical fading. And that can only be good for our society (and, yes, maybe for your company).

#5 – Reject, and renounce the “I must win” mindset.

————————————–

The Making of a Manager Summary and Review

Revised notes from LifeClub

by Julie Zhuo

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #1: A good manager’s job is all about outcomes, not activities.

 She realized that a manager’s role was actually to focus on wider issues. These include ensuring her team was working effectively together, helping team members achieve their career aims, and developing processes to improve efficiency without any hiccups along the way.

But now, with nearly a decade of management experience behind her, Zhuo believes that the answer to what a manager does is far more concise than either of her previous lists capture. The job of a manager, as it turns out, is to achieve improved outcomes from your team. As you work toward this goal, you’ll begin to recognize the difference between a good manager and a mediocre one.

 In other words, the team of a good manager will achieve good results – consistently. So, ask yourself what outcome your team or business seeks. If, like Zhuo, the outcome you’re looking for is a great design, then remember that an excellent manager’s team will consistently pitch you great designs, whereas a mediocre manager’s team will pitch you mediocre designs.

A great manager is one whose team gets great results. It really is that simple – no box-ticking or long lists necessary.

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #2: All routes to management have advantages and pitfalls. 

First, there is the Apprentice path to management. The Apprentice path begins when your boss’s team grows, and she asks you to manage part of it. This was the author’s route to management. As a young designer at Facebook, she was asked to manage part of her boss’s growing design team. One advantage of this route is that you’ll have plenty of guidance during your early months because your own manager will still be around to coach you and answer any questions you may have. However, establishing a good rapport with those working under you can be tricky for apprentice managers. Why? Because they’re used to seeing you as a peer, not as their boss.

Second is the Pioneer route to management. Pioneers start entirely new teams and are responsible for all aspects of that team’s growth. One key advantage of this route is that you get to build your team, rather than inherit it. Thus, you can select who you want to work with and engineer the team dynamics. On the downside, pioneer managers may not receive much support, as no one will understand your team better than you. Therefore, others may find it difficult to help with your particular challenges.

Finally, there is the New Boss path to management. In this scenario, you are brought in, either from a different team or even a different organization, to manage an established workgroup. One advantage of being a new boss is that people will typically cut you some slack during your first few months. Why? Because they’ll appreciate that you’re a newbie, and thus you’re allowed to make mistakes while you learn how everything works. Moreover, it’s important that you make use of this time to sit back and learn. One of the pitfalls of being a new boss is to rush in and change things without fully understanding the nuances of your new position.

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #3: Great managers give activity-specific feedback that goes beyond their own perspective. 

Crucially, you should provide feedback that is specific to one particular task, optimally a task that someone has just completed. For instance, if a team member has just given a presentation, set aside time afterward to tell them what you think went well and how they might improve next time. Activity-specific feedback like this is the most straightforward. Why? Because it revolves around what someone has done, rather than who they are.

By making activity-specific feedback a regular habit, your team members will receive little coaching sessions after every task they undertake.

Another way to give great feedback is to bring in a multitude of perspectives. You can accomplish this by conducting 360-degree feedback sessions. This type of feedback takes the opinions of many different people into account. For instance, if a member of your team just gave a presentation, rather than sending them just your thoughts on the performance, you might share what other people thought too. This type of feedback is valuable because it provides a well-rounded and objective view of how the team member is performing.

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #4: Good meetings have a clear purpose and achieve clear outcomes.

If this is the case, then your meeting must include certain things. Quite clearly, it must involve a decision, but it also needs to include everyone who is directly impacted by this decision. During the meeting, all conceivable options, including relevant information, must be presented objectively. Further, any recommendations the team might have should be articulated. Lastly, your meeting needs to apportion equal time to different opinions and ensure everyone feels their voices are heard. Managers can help with this by calling on attendees who haven’t spoken yet to give their opinion to the group. Thus, it should be clear that all views, no matter how divergent, will be respected.

Alternatively, the intended outcome of your meeting might simply be to share information, rather than decide on something. In this scenario, your meeting needs to accomplish different things. For example, a successful information-sharing meeting should capture attendees’ attention and keep it. This can be achieved through good pacing, facilitating interaction, and even presenting information through storytelling.

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #5: Make smarter recruitment decisions by making a one-year plan.

At the beginning of each calendar year, the author maps out her team’s goals for the next twelve months. As part of this process, she analyzes all the gaps in her team’s skills, experiences, and strengths. She then creates a list of vacancies that she needs to recruit for, according to these gaps.

First, take a look at your team’s priorities, expected rate of attrition, and the budget for the coming year. Based on this information, decide how many recruits you can realistically hire. Next, ask yourself how much experience each recruit should have. Then, think about what strengths and skills your team needs more of, such as creativity, operational know-how, or expertise in a particular area. You should also consider what strengths your team already has in abundance. These are the areas in which your new recruits can afford to be weaker. Lastly, ask yourself what personalities, previous experiences, or traits would strengthen your team’s diversity.

The Making of a Manager Key Idea #6: Leading a growing team requires shifting to indirect management.

If you’re managing only a handful of individuals, your working relationship will probably be more personal. With such a small team, you can grasp the particulars of each person’s work and understand what each individual cares about, where their strengths lie, and even what they like to do in their free time.

But when your team swells to 30 individuals, you won’t be able to manage them directly. However, indirect management brings its own challenges. As the overall manager, you’ll still be responsible for the work of your team, but you’ll also be removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions that get made. This loss of control can be disturbing at first, so don’t worry if it takes time to find the middle ground between deep-diving into a problem and stepping back and trusting your middle managers to handle it.

Another problem of managing a large team is that your team members might start to behave differently around you. Thus, it’s important for managers of large teams to remember that no matter how friendly they might be, their position of authority, coupled with their distance from their indirect reports, might lead their team to see them as unapproachable. To combat this, managers should emphasize that they welcome opinions different from theirs, and make a point of rewarding people who express dissent.

———————-

Read One Law Per Week:

48 Laws of Power

Law #1: Never Outshine the Master

Some points seem similar to Dale Carnegie’s rules. Give honest and sincere appreciation to your boss or supervisor. Makes sense. But this goes a little deeper and darker:

“Make him appear more intelligent than you. Act naive. Make it seem that you need his expertise. Commit harmless mistakes that will not hurt you in the long run but will give you the chance to ask for his help. Masters adore such requests. Make it clear that your advice is merely an echo of his advice. If like Galileo, you can make your master shine even more in the eyes of others, then you are a godsend, and you will be instantly promoted.”

Law #2: Never Put Too Much Trust in Friends. Learn How to Use Enemies

A great example is when Michael III assumed the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In a nutshell, if you give your friends too much power, they will eventually betray you. Your enemies have something to prove, and if you provide them with an opportunity, they will give everything to impress you. A man of power welcomes conflict, and having a declared opponent is better than not knowing where your real enemies lie. Other historical examples serve this justice.

Law #3: Conceal Your Intentions

Example from 1850 Prussian parliament deputy, won a war against the Germans and was promoted in his kingdom. “ By being completely insincere and sending misleading signals, however, he deceived everyone, concealed his purpose, and stained everything he wanted. Such is the power of kidding your intentions.”

“Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals – just not your real ones. You will kill three birds with one stone: You appear friendly, open, and trusting; you conceal your intentions, and you send your rivals on time-consuming wild-goose chases.” 

“Sincerity is a tricky tool: Appear over passionate, and you raise suspicion. Be measured and believable, or your ruse will seem the put-on that it is. The best deceivers do everything they can to cloak their roguish qualities. They cultivate an air of honesty in one area to disguise their dishonesty in others. Honesty is merely another decoy in their arsenal.” 

The chapter is long and dives into different examples of deceptive tools. 

Law #4: Always Say Less than Necessary

Literally, don’t talk too much. “The human tongue is a beast that few can master. It constantly strains to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words. 

Oysters open completely when the moon is full, and when the crab sees one, it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it, and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener. – Leonardo da Vinci

Extra Reading:

“Why the Hell Not” Book: Art of War

I never read it in college, so I wanted to see what all the hype was about related to business. I see similarity to the 48 laws of power.

• All warfare is based on deception
• Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him
• The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculation lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat. 
• There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare
• In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns
• Five essentials for victory:
  • He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight
  • He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces
  • He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks
  • He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared
  • He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign 
• What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins but excels in winning with ease
• Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won
• Appear at points which the enemy use hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected
• Knowing the place and time of the coming battle, we may concentrate on the greatest distances in order to fight
• So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and ate strike at what is weak. (Low hanging fruit)
• We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides (Use the client IT staff to help you navigate their infrastructure)
• A clever general, therefore, avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return. This is the art of studying moods. (Know when to ask for something. Study the mood of the person you are asking something from.)
• He must be able to mystify his officers and men by false reports and appearances, and thus keep them in total ignorance. 
• If it is to your advantage, move forward; if not, stay where you are. (The promotion is not always worth it)